News and Insight for Sales Leaders by Gerhard Gschwandtner

Sales Leadership

08/30/2016

Today’s guest post is by Diane Williams, product manager for the SPIN® Portfolio of training programs for MHI Global. She is responsible for the development of new programs that support the use of SPIN skills.

The corporate world is in the midst of a significant shift in business strategy. The established emphasis on bottom-line efficiency that gave the business world such familiar techniques as downsizing, restructuring overhead value analysis, and reengineering is being replaced by a new interest in strategies for boosting growth.

The sign that the shift is both real and profound can be seen in the changing pattern of consulting revenues. Consulting firms, which a couple of years ago were grazing the lush pastures of cost-reduction advice, are now experiencing something of a famine. Because of that, many consulting firms have opened sales-effectiveness practices to help their clients boost revenue.

Here’s how they’re doing it – and how you can, too.

Selling cheaper. The easiest strategy for boosting revenue – particularly for those whose background and expertise are in cost reduction – has been to find cheaper ways to reach a wider customer base. The Internet has blossomed as a low-cost way to expand the width of customer contact, and there’s also a well-established track record for reaching a wider customer base at a low cost through telemarketing and alternative distribution channels. Consequently, most corporations with low-end products and a substantial customer base have drastically reduced their face-to-face sales forces during the past two years and continue to move toward cheaper alternative delivery systems.

Selling deeper. Purchasing has changed drastically over the years. The average industrial companies are continuing to cut supplier bases by more than half. Because of that, transactional purchasing (i.e., putting out a bid and allowing suppliers to respond) is seen as a heavy strain on resources, while the rise of alternative relationship models, such as partnering, allows for deeper, more meaningful, and longer lasting transactions.

Shifting the source of value. Many sales functions – particularly those that sell through highly compensated salespeople – add negligible value to the overall sales effort. The sales organization provides little more than minor administrative support, telephones, and business cards. Almost all the value of these sales functions resides in individual salespeople and not in the institution. This makes the typical sales organization uncomfortably vulnerable.

If the value of the sales organization lies in individual salespeople, then there’s a real risk that superstars will jump ship, tempted by competitors’ offers – taking their books of business with them. This vulnerability puts many organizations at risk, leading strategists to search for ways to embed more value at an institutional level.

At the same time, when salespeople add all the value, they rightly expect to receive a disproportionate share of the rewards. Many of them have become – to put it mildly – highly compensated. This leads to something of a Catch-22 phenomenon. In most sales organizations, promotion into management means a significant drop in remuneration. Still, it’s hard to add value at an institutional level unless you can attract talented individuals.

In this way, sales organizations are imprisoned by the high rewards they have to pay salespeople who provide all the value. Because of that, many organizations are revisiting their sales process and working to come up with a way to help a wider range of sales professionals succeed. By shifting the source of value, the benefits can spread throughout the company.

08/17/2016

Do you get frustrated working with people who don’t have the same motivation, work ethic, or desire to succeed as you? I understand how it feels. It’s not easy.

So here are some tips on how to identify whether you have a team of top performers.

Tip #1 –Desire and Motivation: Do they even have the desire and motivation to be a top performer? Are they willing to put in the time and effort? You may be, but they may not. I’ve worked with people who are content with average performance. If they don’t have the desire or motivation, you’ll need to work with what you have until you can make changes to replace them.

Tip #2 – Skills: Do they have the right selling and interpersonal skills? Have they been properly trained? Take time to consistently provide the tools and techniques they need to excel. If they aren’t willing to sharpen their skills and continue to grow, you can’t force them. Once again, you’ll need to work with what you have until you can make changes to replace them.

Tip #3 – Attitude: Do they have a good attitude? Some may have a sense of entitlement or know-it-all attitude because they’re tenured. They feel that, because they’ve been with the company for a long time, they should get special treatment. Their peers notice and question this attitude.

Tip #4 – Responsiveness: Are they responsive to emails and phone calls or are they disrespectful? I’ve worked with people who didn’t think twice about not responding. And I was shocked at how people thought it was okay to be so disrespectful to supervisors, teammates, peers, or customers. Take time to evaluate your team’s attitude and ensure you have a team of positive people who are not tainting others.

Tip #5 – Coaching and Feedback: Are they open to coaching and feedback? It’s painful to work with someone who has enormous potential – but who resists coaching and feedback. To me, school is always in session for pros. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on my own personal growth. Even if someone doesn’t want your coaching and feedback, it’s your job and responsibility as a leader give it to them anyway. You don’t have to give up just because they do.

If you discover you don’t have the team you’d like, then it’s time to make some changes. Don’t wait. Start now.

08/16/2016

Today’s post is by Danny Wong, a marketing consultant, sales strategist, and writer. He leads marketing at Tenfold, a seamless click-to-dial solution for high-performance sales teams. Connect with him on Twitter @dannywong1190.

Unfortunately, inside and outside sales teams often clash. They might fight over which clients fall into a team’s jurisdiction. Or, inside reps might refuse to hand over large clients because they don’t want to lose the commission.

To implement an efficient sales plan throughout your organization, inside and outside sales strategies must complement one another. Here are six ways you can make sure they do:

1. Start from the Beginning

The key to creating complementary sales strategies starts with job descriptions. If the company’s inside and outside sales teams are duplicating efforts or not working to their strengths, productivity suffers.

A good framework is using inside sales reps to prospect and touch base with dormant accounts through email and phone calls. Outside reps, on the other hand, can help them break into and manage larger clients that benefit from a face-to-face relationship. This frees both teams to focus on what they do best, complementing each other perfectly.

2. Empower Your Team with Technology

The easier you make it for your inside and outside reps to work together, the more likely it is that they will do so. Invest in a CRM system that makes it easy for multiple reps to keep tabs on a single account. At a minimum, they should be able to leave notes, attach important documents, and update contact information on the fly. You will also want to invest in software that facilitates internal communications and interdepartmental collaboration.

3. Host Inclusive Meetings

Instead of holding separate meetings for your inside and outside sales teams, consider holding all your sales meetings together. This gives your salespeople the chance to spend more time together, learn from each other, and discuss important strategies. Ensure your sales managers work side by side during these meetings to further drive home exactly how connected the two functions are to the company’s overall goals.

4. Set Shared Bonuses

Money is a powerful motivator. To integrate your inside and outside sales strategies, you need to modify the way your commission and bonus structure works. If commissions are paid out solely to the rep who closes a deal, inside and outside sales teams will compete against each other – to the detriment of your company and your clients. If you can find a way to pair their performance and reward everybody fairly, however, they will not only work together but they will openly root for one another.

5. Develop a Clear Career Path

One of the biggest problems that comes with managing inside and outside sales reps is that outside sales reps tend to be more experienced. They engage bigger clients, close larger contracts, and earn more money. It is often difficult for inside sales reps stuck working the phones to find much in common with them.

That is why making a clear career path that leads inside sales roles into outside sales roles makes a lot of sense. It instantly turns outside salespeople into mentors for inside sales reps. Most importantly, it makes future collaboration much easier. After all, your outside reps will know exactly what it means to have done inside sales for the company.

6. Unify Management

When inside sales reps report to their own manager and the outside sales team reports to another, it can create confusion and lead to conflict. The best-case scenario is having both teams reporting to a single manager. If that isn’t possible, you need to make sure the two managers work very closely to ensure their goals and strategies are aligned.

You can also unify your management team simply by ensuring both managers have the same boss. If both teams ultimately report to a single sales director, it is much easier to coordinate complementary sales efforts.

07/05/2016

One of the biggest questions sales leaders ask me is: “How do I keep my team motivated?”

In my 20+ years as a sales manager and sales director working for some of the most recognized Fortune 100 companies – such as American Express and Sprint – I’ve taken some of the lowest performing teams to the top of nationwide rankings and can help you learn how to do the same.

Here are a few keys to keeping your sales team motivated – and a little about my philosophy.

Key #1: Give Recognition.

Who doesn’t want to be recognized for a job well done? Recognition goes a long way and can be a great motivator. The key, though, is to give recognition consistently. Recognize as many people as you can and as often as you can – even if it’s for small things. Recognize them in a variety of ways. Be sure to include and recognize everyone who played a part in assisting the win, such as support staff, technical staff, and customer service.

Key #2: Use Rewards.

Rewards can also motivate a sales team. To be most effective, ask your team what rewards would motivate them – not what you think would motivate them. Run contests and get creative on what the winner receives. Sometimes running a contest doesn’t even require a large budget. I’ve seen contests get a lot of mileage just because the winner got bragging rights. Have fun with rewards and get creative with how you can reward people based on your budget.

Key #3: Remind them about thewhys.

Why are they getting up each day and working hard? Is it to become debt free? To buy a new home or car? To retire early? Or to go on fabulous vacations like I like to do? Make sure you know what the reason is for each person you work with.

These are a just few keys you can use to help keep your team motivated, but here’s a little bit more about my personal philosophy on motivating a team. When someone asks me, “Diane, how do I keep my team motivated?” my answer is, “You shouldn’t have to.” I don’t believe you should have to motivate your team. If you do, it may be an indication you could have the wrong team members. I’ve never needed my leaders to motivate me. In fact, I would have been embarrassed if they had to.

Motivation is something you can’t teach. Sure, you may be able to motivate someone short term, but it fizzles out quickly. Frankly, people either have it or they don’t. The key is to hire salespeople who have their own internal motivation.

06/09/2016

Today’s post is by Josiane Feigon, founder and president of TeleSmart Communications. Hear her speak on “Creating Change: What’s It Going to Take for My Sales Teams to Start Selling?” at the Sales 2.0 Conference July 18-19 in San Francisco.

Asking salespeople to change their work habits, behaviors, and attitude is one of the toughest things managers face. Even when change is charging at us at breakneck speed, we can’t expect salespeople to instantly change – mainly because of these common reasons:

93.3 percent fear the unknown or failure

90.5 percent experience insufficient communication

90.2 percent are comfortable with current state

89.9 percent don’t see the benefits of change

80.6 percent lack preparation for new roles

77.5 percent are concerned for loss of status or job security

But, if we want to see real change, we need to really understand where salespeople are coming from – and the following Four Zones clearly explain what influences change.

The Dead Zone: People in this zone have checked out. Basically, they just don’t care. These folks are probably your low to medium performers. They’ve plateaued, and have no desire to advance further.

The Comfort Zone: People in this zone are sitting comfortably in their own little world. They are complacent, resisting any change happening around them. These average performers will do just enough to get by, and won’t show initiative for anything else.

The Panic Zone: People in this zone feel anxious, nervous, frazzled, and overwhelmed. They care a lot – and maybe a bit too much. They are ambitious and take on a lot.

The Stretch Zone: People in this zone are excited (but not overexcited), enthusiastic, and ambitious; they have new goals, ideas, and strategies. They care a lot and want to do things differently. These are probably your top performers.

These zones are fluid and people change from one to another. As a manager, understanding how to coach people in these zones will guide you toward changing behaviors.

Coaching in the Dead Zone

This zone is dangerous because people who no longer care are resistant to trying anything new – they are very close to leaving the organization. When coaching them, find out what got them into this zone – it could be for personal or professional reasons, or both. Then have that tough talk with them. Ask them if they think they are in the right role; you may want to encourage them to move into a different role or department.

Coaching in the Comfort Zone

Salespeople who have been part of the old sales regimen may fall into this comfort zone. They are low-risk about adopting new ideas and they’re stuck. But they can be coached, because they really care. When you coach someone in the Comfort Zone, you must include strategies that shake them up and change their routine, their territory, their product responsibilities – or perhaps their vertical. You might try putting them on a new project to manage, giving them the opportunity for recognition and reward.

Coaching in the Panic Zone

These people can be new hires who have finally realized what is expected of them and are running scared; or they may be overachieving senior team members with low self-esteem who panic at the end of the month to hit their numbers. Help them understand that panic isn’t the answer, and help them separate things that really need their attention from those that can wait. Be gentle. The last thing they need is pressure from you – they are putting enough pressure on themselves. Prioritize with them. Help them slow down, sort through, and organize what’s in front of them.

Stretch Zone

We wish all our team members could be in the Stretch Zone. Nonetheless, coaching someone in this zone is delicate – you don’t want to kill their spirit, just keep them on task. Coach them to stay focused, enthusiastic, and ambitious, but keep them in check.

What percentage of your team is in each zone? Ideally, you want your team balanced in all zones. But – depending on your team structure, their seniority, and the time of the sales quarter – your team is likely to be heavy in one zone.

For more on this topic, come to the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on July 18 and 19, 2016, and hear Josiane Feigon present “Creating Change: What’s It Going to Take for My Sales Teams to Start Selling?”

05/25/2016

In my 20+ years as a sales manager and sales director working for some of the most recognized Fortune 100 companies – such as American Express and Sprint – I’ve had to learn how to quickly drive sales results. I've taken some of the lowest performing teams to the top of nationwide rankings and can show you how to do the same.

Here are a few of the most important things to focus on with your employees that will help you drive top results.

Tip #1: Don't have meetings for the sake of having meetings

Time is precious. More time is spent these days on internal conference calls talking to company employees than it is on selling and meeting with clients. Your company may require you to do weekly 1:1 calls or be in the field a certain amount of time, so you want to follow those guidelines, but I've never believed in having a meeting for the sake of having a meeting. At times, I'd change weekly calls to bi-weekly calls – or even cancelled them – to give my team more time to sell. Small things like this can mean a lot to employees and put more money in their pockets by allowing them more selling time. More selling time leads to higher performance.

Tip #2: Go back to the basics

Driving top results doesn't mean getting fancy with new tricks, gimmicks, or the latest and greatest new theory or concept, but it does mean getting back to the basics – the basics meaning activity: the calls, appointments, and closes. As simple as it sounds, it's easy to lose sight of this as a leader because of all the hats you need to wear. You and each of your direct reports need to know their numbers and ratios. When in doubt, always go back to the basics – they work.

Tip #3: Work withtop 10 lists

Every person on your team should have a list of the top 10 clients with whom you want to close business readily available and updated at all times. These are typically the largest clients that will make you the largest commissions. This list becomes a priority for the rep to meet with and close. If your rep makes multiple attempts to meet with the client with no luck, help them find partners, vendors, or other clients who can refer them in. I've seen huge success from top performers when there's a focus on targeting a top 10 list.

For more details and information about our programs and services and how you and your teams can rise to the top and be part of the elite, go to www.EliteSalesLeaders.com and watch our video – “How Elite Sales Leaders Drive Top Results” – at https://youtu.be/UBxa8ScLipY. Don't forget to like us on Facebook and share your comments. I look forward to hearing how you rise to the top and join the elite!

04/27/2016

Modern sales professionals require a much different skill set in order to be successful in today’s tech-driven world. Sales requires researching, listening, strategic thinking, as well as strong communicating – often referred to as “consultative sales.” Salespeople are no longer simply order takers, as they are required to provide detailed knowledge and insight about a product or service as it relates to the customer’s business. In many ways, great sales professionals have become more like consultants.

Why Salespeople Must Add Value

Buyers are becoming increasingly aware of the options available to them because of the abundance of information available on the Internet. In fact, according to the Forbes article, “The Disappearing Sales Process,”“customers reported to being nearly 60 percent through the sales process before engaging a sales rep.” This tells us that, if your salespeople aren’t contributing beyond what appears on your Website, they’re not adding value.

That’s why salespeople need to be more knowledgeable than ever about the customers and industries they serve. They not only need to be trained in the ways of selling, but also in how businesses within their target markets operate and how your products and services can solve their specific business challenges.

A recent blog post by Jeff Thomas, the vice president of sales at SEMrush, adds to this:

“You cannot reasonably expect to consult with someone if you do not know your stuff. Depending on your client base, you may never be better at their job than they are, but you need to know how your product and solution will impact them in a positive and meaningful way. You need to be able to ask questions and give answers that relate their expertise to your product.”

How Can Salespeople Become Experts?

This requires salespeople to not only be aware of what’s going on in the target industry they serve, but also become experts on it – and that means learning and researching on an ongoing basis. Since most sales professionals deal with many clients – often across multiple industries – the challenge of keeping up can grow exponentially.

With this trend of consultative sales, it’s become more common for companies to hire salespeople who have a background in the industry to which they will be expected to sell. This, however, may not be the right approach. Given how fast industries change and how sales reps may need to cover multiple industries, isn’t it a better approach to hire sales professionals with the right skills and provide them with the tools to learn about the customers and industries they serve?

The Benefits of Just-in-Time Learning

One solution to this conundrum is just-in-time learning. When implemented correctly, it provides a combination of training in both sales techniques and industry knowledge to back up the benefits of a product or service – allowing reps to talk to customers in a highly relevant manner. At its foundation, just-in-time learning eschews the traditional sales kickoff or training event in favor of a method that gives sales reps the ability to share content – pitch examples, best practices, lessons learned, tips, etc. – when and where they need it most. So, whether the rep is prepping her pitch in her office the day before the meeting, or in the parking lot minutes before it starts, she’s able to get information that will help her close the sale at a more effective point.

This kind of training is what sets great salespeople apart from the pack. In this blog post, George Athan, the chief strategist at MindStorm Strategic Consulting, says, “In consulting for many organizations and training sales teams, it is alarming that most salespeople are not taught how to effectively sell. The organizations that do training, often times it is not done effectively, and/or not consistently. This rings especially true when it comes to consultative selling.”

Hiring people based solely on industry expertise or their “sales personality” is the wrong approach. As is trying to onboard new reps with a firehose of information. Organizations that hire salespeople with the versatile skills required for modern selling and then arm their teams with just-in-time learning tools are much more likely to have success.

It’s time to provide sales professionals with tools that match today’s demands and empower sales reps to be consultants and not order takers.

Sometimes we have to reinvent ourselves in order to succeed. To become a “sales superstar,” you have to adapt, work hard, persevere, and have the ability to recognize your full potential. Finding a way to define your future success will help you set goals, navigate unplanned detours, and achieve unprecedented results.

Create a Goal. Chart a Course. Achieve the Goal.

Identifying where you are right now is the first step. You can’t begin moving in the right direction until you can define your present role. Knowing what you can offer – and understanding your talents – are essential to your success. Without that knowledge, you can’t define the methods for reaching your goals.

Once you’ve identified your current position, you’ll need to identify your end goal by employing backward thinking. Chart your course to success by beginning at the end. Picture what your end goal will look like and what you want to have achieved. Then, work backwards – plotting out each action you’ll need to take in order to reach that end goal. Your vision for the future will essentially determine what your future holds.

To give yourself the best chance to succeed, do one simple thing: write your goals down. It doesn’t matter if you use pen and paper or type it up in a Word document. Just record your goals. The chances of you reaching that goal increase exponentially once you write it down. Dreams don’t often come true, but goals in writing do.

Write your goals down. It’s efficient, simple, and effective.

Define Your Goals

Most people have no problem setting goals. It’s easy to create goals – especially those with short life expectancies, as we see every New Year’s. But the vast majority of these goals are abandoned within the first few weeks of setting resolutions. The hard part is defining those goals for the optimal chance of success. That’s where most people falter. If you can’t define your goals, you can’t achieve your goals.

Three Simple Guidelines

Here’s how to extend the life expectancy of your goals while avoiding the pitfalls that stop most people:

Set goals that are nonnegotiable

Set goals that are difficult

Set goals that are important to you

Setting a nonnegotiable goal negates the ability to waiver on your decision. This is especially true in sales, where everything is based on establishing and maintaining relationships. If your clients see you setting goals you never achieve, you’ll lose credibility.

Setting difficult goals will help you remain focused on the task at hand while lessening your chances of procrastinating. Here are two goals: (1) Exercise three times a week, and (2) Keep your family safe. Which is more difficult? Keeping your family safe, right? Sure, finding the time and energy to exercise can be difficult, but the scope of the second goal is much more involved, stressful, and even intimidating.

Setting goals that are important to you provides motivation to help complete the goal. Meeting with three clients next week to nurture relationships is great, but so is adding three new clients next month. Which one is more important? If you’ve done a good job building a relationship with your current clients, it’s going to be more important for you to gain new clients that will contribute to your productivity and increased profits.

Don’t Be Easy on Yourself

Goals that are nonnegotiable, difficult, and important to you are the ones that will drain you of your energy and increase your frustration levels. But guess what? They’re worth it. These are the goals that will excite you. If you’re serious about meeting your goals, then setting nonnegotiable, difficult, and important goals will feel like a natural progression toward your success.

More than Just Business

Too many businesses think of goals only in terms of business. Broaden your thinking – include quality of life and personal goals. Denis Waitley once said, “Most people spend more time planning Christmas and holidays than they do planning their life.” Make your goals multidimensional. Don’t limit yourself.

Hold Yourself Accountable

Here’s where you can take your turn in the hot seat. Share your goals with people you respect and care about and establish a system to review your performance. Ask for their feedback. Schedule a review at least once every quarter where you can assess your progress and make adjustments accordingly.

Good sales professionals prioritize everything, including clients. Clients are actually one of the most important things you can prioritize. Every salesperson should have a list of their top 30 prospects. Prioritize them according to your sales prospecting activity over the past 90 days, top hurdles associated with winning over the prospect, solutions to leap those hurdles, and, finally, a targeted timeline for winning over the prospect.

Set Some Goals

Focus precedes success. Once your goals are in writing and you’ve got a system in place to acquire results, make sure each of your goals is (1) nonnegotiable, (2) difficult, and (3) important to you. You’ll find yourself much more focused and motivated once you’ve defined your goals.

12/22/2015

I spend many days on the road each year speaking to audiences of salespeople and sales leaders. Many of them have big dreams. They want to build success for themselves and their companies. But they are allowing certain elements to hold them back from making those dreams a reality.

To win in sales and life, we need three things: knowledge, ability, and courage. Because it is the end of the year, we will all be thinking about resolutions, goals, and ways to improve ourselves. As this year winds down, I think about one of my good friends, Dr. Wayne Dyer, who passed away earlier this year. As a psychologist, speaker, and bestselling author, Dyer told me we have all we need to succeed – the problem is that most of us look in the wrong place.

To make your life all you want it to be, stop wishing. Years ago, Dr. Dyer shared these five steps with me to make success happen for yourself. In honor of his life and the New Year, I share them with you now.

Step One: Feel Worthy

“Knowing you’re worthy means understanding your connection to that which causes things to show up in the first place. If you feel separate from it, or if you feel that you’re not worthy, or if you feel that God or divinity or whatever that energy might be is something external to yourself and that you’re not worthy of having it, then it will always elude you,” Dyer says. “It’s like thinking of God as the ocean and yourself as a glass. When you dip that glass into the ocean, what you have is a glass of God. It’s not as big, it’s not as strong, but it is still a piece of God, and is connected to that source.”

Step Two: Love Without Limits

When you can harness the power of unconditional love, Dyer says, you’re a big step closer to manifesting your destiny. “I think if you want to master anything in your life,” he says, “whether it’s selling, singing, dancing the Macarena or hitting a tennis ball, you go through pathways. The first is discipline, then you move to what we call wisdom. But the third pathway to mastery is called the pathway of unconditional love.” With unconditional love, he says, limitations and fears disappear and leave power and joy in their place.

Step Three: Make a Joyful Noise

In his explanation of the seventh principle of manifestation in Manifest Your Destiny, Dyer presents sound as a link between the material and the spiritual worlds. He explains that all sounds are vibrations made of waves oscillating at a particular frequency. Solid forms occur at low frequencies of those vibrations, and, Dyer says, it is theorized that thoughts occur at frequencies too high to measure with available technology. By repeating the sounds of creation (ahhh) and the sounds of manifestation (om) during meditation each morning and evening and carefully observing the remaining eight principles of manifestation, you can put yourself in harmony with your environment, attain peace and enlightenment, and gather the energy of creation.

Step Four: Stay Separate from the Outcome

To manifest the things you want in your life, you can’t be preoccupied with when or how they arrive. Dyer says many salespeople don’t understand how to detach themselves from the outcome of what they’re doing, but that very highly functioning people “are not motivated by what’s in it for them, what their quotas are, how much money they’re going to make, and how good they’re going to look. They’re motivated by knowing within that they’re on the right path and can let the universe or God handle all of the details.” By recognizing your oneness with what you want to manifest and your connection to a universal intelligence, Dyer says, you can be so certain that your desires will appear that you don’t have to worry about when and how they will.

Step Five: Be Grateful for What You’ve Got

When you acknowledge and show your appreciation of the energy that flows through all things, Dyer says, your gratitude becomes a key to fulfilling your desires. Only by being thankful for what you’ve got can you make progress toward getting more. To develop a sense of gratitude, abandon any tendencies you may have toward fault finding, complaining, or taking what you already have for granted. Instead, think of yourself as a recipient, not as a victim. Tell the people around you how much you appreciate them. Begin and end your days with expressions of gratitude and remember to be thankful for hard times so you won’t take the good times for granted.

Finally, Dyer recommends cultivating a generous spirit, which he says helps you release the ego that tells you that you can’t – instead of reassuring you that you can.

11/10/2015

Today’s post is by LaVon Koerner, president and chief revenue officer of Revenue Storm.

In my view, U.S. presidential election cycles are nothing more than expensive and colossal sales cycles – creating an inviting landscape for learning which sales practices work and which do not.

As each candidate announces he or she is running for President, the question that comes to mind is, “Why are they doing this?” If the candidate does not state why, the voting population is left to deduct the answer from its own observations based upon what the candidate is saying. Does the candidate’s stated reason have the “ring of truth?” Do we deem the candidate to be transparent and well intended?

At the root of the U.S. obsession with knowing the candidate’s motives is a deeper and more relevant question – “Can I trust the candidate?” That’s why motives matter!

In the U.S. presidential campaign, as with all countries, the voters need to know if the candidate can be entrusted with their country and their future. That answer cannot be determined until it is known, at the very deepest level, what the candidate is trying to accomplish. To ascertain the candidate’s motives, we screen his or her answer through our cynical test question of – “What is in it for them?”

If the candidate’s answer is believed to be more about self-advancement, we are immediately disenchanted. If, however, the answer is the advancement of our country, we will be stirred to uncover the answer to the next automatic question – “Is the advancement of the country in line with our thinking and does it make intuitive sense?”

If the answer to that question is also yes, we will go to the third round of questioning – “Do they have the plan and skills to pull it off?”

If the answer again is yes, they have just passed the initial test, and we will then view the candidate as viable. Now, all we have to do is compare him or her to other viable candidates to make our selection. But the answer to that initial question of motive does not mean we will now vote for that candidate. It only means we consider him or her to be qualified – a viable candidate worthy of consideration.

What is so interesting about identifying candidates’ motives to ascertain their viability is that it is identical to what takes place in every sales cycle in the marketplace. Motives matter – especially in those early moments of the sales cycle where the customer is qualifying you, not your product. This is the time when your personal feasibility and viability are being adjudicated.. If you pass the test, it simply means you are in the race. Now, we can talk about your solution.

This is borne out by science. In Revenue Storm’s large (17,000+) database of B2B sales professionals, it became indisputably clear that motives matter in all sales situations. The data gathered from our validated psychometric diagnostic instrument was revealing. The people with the highest and most intensive scores in the attribute cluster of “people orientation” consistently scored the highest in their individual ability to successfully navigate the perils of sophisticated sales cycles involving multiple calls on multiple people, at multiple levels, over multiple months.

People Orientation Cluster

Client Oriented

The tendency to take a client perspective to anticipate and satisfy their needs and desires.

Socially Perceptive

An awareness of the appropriate behavior for a given situation because of a sensitivity to human dynamics.

Empathic

The tendency to relate to other people’s issues or environment and react with sensitivity.

Team Oriented

The predisposition to interact with others in a collaborative fashion in order to achieve a group objective.

Mentors

The inclination to spend personal time to help others develop their skills and potential.

A person who scores high in the attributes contributing to this cluster can be seen as an outward-focused individual who would be viewed as a loving and caring person with honest and trustworthy motives.

As an example, one of the attributes in this “people orientation” cluster is empathy, which is defined as a person who has the tendency to relate to other people’s issues or environment and react with sensitivity. Such a person would not advance themselves at the direct expense of their customer or voter. Whether you are running for President of the United States, or are a professional salesperson, your motives matter.

Any intuitive buyer and/or voter will be watching and making an initial judgment concerning you. And, if that judgment comes up negative, it may not matter very much as to what you are selling or saying. They won’t be listening – because motives matter!